Five Ways To Tell Google What Your Website Is About

Let’s face it, the search engine spiders (aka Googlebot and Bingbot) aren’t as sophisticated as they think they are or as they should be. The only way for them to truly know what a web page is about is for you to tell them… better yet, for you to scream at them!

Unfortunately, many business owners and webmasters might not know this, especially those who are wearing multiple hats within their organizations. In my post today, I want it to be crystal clear to business owners and webmasters exactly what you need to do to scream “my site is about [insert topic here]” to the search engines. These SEO tweaks will help each of your pages become more relevant for keyword sets or themes and ultimately help them begin to gain visibility in the search engines. Let’s dive in!

Optimized Meta Tags

In essence, there are two specific meta tags that when optimized for a keyword set, scream to the search engines, this page is about X. These are the title tag and the meta description. Optimizing the title tag and meta description isn’t rocket science, but it does require some thinking and strategy. This isn’t going to be a post on how to optimize, so here are two really awesome guides on how to properly optimize the title tag and meta description.

Optimized Content

Despite popular belief by small businesses, the search engines can and do look at your content and try to understand what it is about. Having sufficient content on each page of your site, optimized for unique keyword themes (don’t optimize more than one page per keyword theme) will send strong signals to the engines as to what the page is about. For an amazing guide on content optimization, jump over to Stone Temple where Eric Enge lays it all out for you.

Structured Data

Taking content optimization to the next level and really screaming at the search engines can be done by marking up your content with structured data. In short, structured data is a way to tell the search engines THIS IS A PRODUCT or THIS IS A LOCATION OF MY BUSINESS! To learn more about structured data and how to implement it, click here.

Inbound Links

Links from external web pages in addition to other pages on your website will also tell a search engine what the linking page is about. Acquiring links from internal and external pages that are similar with keywords related to the linking page will help a search engine anticipate what the page they are going to is about.

Social Media

Very similar to links, social signals can also help a search engine associate keywords with a web page. When you are sharing a link on Twitter, Facebook, or Google+, make sure to use the title of the post (remember, use your keywords in the title ) in your description, this way the engines will know what the content is going to be about when they crawl through your site.

Combining and leveraging each of these elements will help you make an extremely strong case to the search engines that your page is relevant for specific keywords and help you rank higher and generate more traffic to your site. What other elements do you feel send strong signals to the search engines? Please share in the comments section below.

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About Greg Shuey

Greg is a member of the executive team at Stryde and a seasoned digital marketer who has worked with thousands of businesses, large and small, to generate more revenue via online marketing strategy and execution.
Greg has written hundreds of blog posts as well as spoken at many events about online marketing strategy.
You can follow Greg on Twitter. Circle him on Google+, and connect with him on LinkedIn

One Comment

Hi Greg,
As far as optimized content, it’s possible to overdo this. As you point out, optimizing multiple pages for the same keyword theme is a bad idea. In fact, according to Google, it can bring diminishing returns. Google’s Matt Cutts did a video not so long ago about the dangers of optimizing every page of a website with the same exact keywords. So scream, but not too loud. Thanks for sharing with the BizSugar community.